Anyway, I'm trying not to make this sound stupid since I've tried to read the guides on the site, and chances are the instructions are in there anyway, but the massive complexity of them all just tends to blow me away. My question is this: As far as my source video goes, the only thing I'm doing is ripping it off various dvds, editing and compressing scenes in VirtualDubMod with HuffYUV, and importing those scenes into premiere. Is there anything else I need to do before importing them so the final export and compression process won't be screwed up? If so, what? (note: I haen't even begun to comprehend what to do in the actual compression stages with AVIsynth and XviD and all that, I'm just asking this so I can start putting movies together in premiere now without the fear of them being completely useless later because I didn't do something with my source video. As always, I appreciate any help.)

The guides are complex, and a new one is being worked on. It sounds like your good to go, I'd rcommend looking at the guides as you learn editing, they'll eventually make more sense if you keep at it. It's a pain in the ass, but experimentation is the best way to go. The guides really make much more sense after your first screw up, than reading them and then trying to do something.

You may also want to look into making avs scripts and using those instead of huffy clips to save space.

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Orwell wrote:The guides are complex, and a new one is being worked on. It sounds like your good to go, I'd rcommend looking at the guides as you learn editing, they'll eventually make more sense if you keep at it. It's a pain in the ass, but experimentation is the best way to go. The guides really make much more sense after your first screw up, than reading them and then trying to do something.

You may also want to look into making avs scripts and using those instead of huffy clips to save space.

Thanks - could you run me through the basics of avs scripts? As I say, the guides are pretty confusing and I haven't quite gotten down all the programming and computer lingo yet.

Did you IVTC / deinterlace your DVD footage? If not, read this page of the guide and the 'Analyzing the Footage' page it links to.

In short, you want your footage to be progressive before it hits your editing program, because doing it afterwards is very difficult. Fades and effects will mess up the field information, and because the clips are all chopped up the common three-frames-clear-two-frames-combed pattern is harder to find.

On preview:

An AviSynth script is a series of commands that tells compatible programs what to do with a video source. You start out with a source filter and then apply transformation filters. A source filter is one that provides a video clip (or still image) for output. The common ones you'll be using are MPEG2Source, which is for loading the d2v file(s), and AVISource, which is for loading the Premiere export of the finished video. Transformation filters alter the video they're given, and they're what you'll be using for resizing, image cleanup, IVTC and deinterlace, and fixing any source-specific problems. A really basic script will go something like this:

MPEG2Source("C:\yourfolder\blah.d2v") #loads the d2v made from the vob
Telecide(order=1,guide=1) #restores progressive frames by matching fields
Decimate(cycle=5, mode=2) #removes duplicate frames from the now-progressive source
Deen() #a smoother. There are better ones out there, but this one is covered in the guide.
mftoon() #sharpens and darkens lines, which is useful for anime. It's a one-size-fits-all filter that doesn't actually fit very many sources, and it's really slow as well.
ConvertFPS(24) #changes the framerate to 24fps. Premiere and other editors can have problems handling 23.976fps video. You can convert the audio too so that when you change the video back to 23.976 after editing it all matches up... but it doesn't matter if you forget because it doesn't make all that much difference.

I do not endorse the above script and use it only for demonstration purposes.